“Personal Environments: The secret to success in recovery”
Thursday February 18
7:00pm, central time
Couples in recovery need to stay connected emotionally, and addicts’ spouses need to get consistent updates about sobriety. People struggling with sexual addiction/dependence often have a hard time with this — they resist the accountability of regular sobriety updates, and they struggle to know how to build emotional intimacy in general. On top of this, most couples - even when addiction is not present - find that in the busyness of a typical week, this emotional connection gets easily lost.
Over time, my colleagues Mark and Debbie Laaser have developed an acronym for couples to use as a guide for regular “check in” conversations. These conversations can be long or short, it’s up to you. We use the acronym FANOS - from the Greek word phainos which means “to bring to light” - to guide the conversation:
To go through the conversation, one person goes through all five “questions” or topics in a row. Then it’s the other spouse’s turn. I suppose it’s obvious, but the spouse of the addict does not check in about sobriety. Depending on how much detail you want to go into, the conversation can last 5-10 minutes, or over an hour.
My wife and I have used “FANOS” conversations for over five years. Early on, we tried to do these conversations every day. Now we do them several times a week. We find that when we go through this conversation, if there is time, we wind up asking each other clarifying questions, or thinking of other things to say beyond a strict answer.
Try using this acronym as a guide for a conversation with your spouse every day or every few days. You will be amazed at the sense of ongoing intimacy you experience.
One husband says: “FANOS conversations have been a key part of re-building intimacy and trust in our marriage. Sometimes we go through them quickly, and just give short updates, other times the questions open up issues that we spend more time on. They’ve been really helpful for my recovery, and great for our relationship.”
Most of the men I work with have a long history of failed attempts at overcoming sexual temptation. One of the most common strategies people in churches use is having an accountability partner. I have nothing against accountability partners … they just don’t work.
Listen to this recording - a short excerpt from an audio program called “The Spiritual Questions and Challenges of Recovery” - to find out why:
Show me a pornography or other type of sex addict who has an accountability partner - and is doing little else for his recovery - and I will show you someone who is struggling. Either acting out with whatever behaviors he’s dealing with, or hanging onto his sobriety with his fingernails and really struggling. Church leaders, spouses of strugglers, parents … please hear me on this … accountability is over-rated! It’s only part of the solution.
To live in recovery, we must be willing to take responsibility for the anger that we carry within us. We are not bad people because we feel angry. No one wants to think of themselves as an angry person, and we are no exception. But when we refuse to acknowledge the anger and resentment that we have stored within us, two things happen:
(1) we turn our back on ourselves and refuse to accept a very important part of ourselves
(2) we ask the people close to us to hold our feelings for us, to be the containers of our unconscious, or the feelings inside of ourselves that we do not wish to see.
Because we deny our anger to ourselves does not mean that it goes away. We must be willing to consider that there might be something more to it, that we may be carrying feelings of anger that we need to accept.
Dealing with the anger inside us does not mean we need to act on it, and do or say things that might hurt others. Owning it and working through it could be accomplished by taking a walk, or meditating, or journaling, to sort out what we’re feeling and why. It may also be helpful to talk through our feelings with a safe and trusted friend or counselor, rather than rushing to confront the person we’re angry at.
Are we willing to own our anger?
(This is a meditation remix … adapted from Tian Dayton’s wonderful book “Forgiving and Moving On“)
Date: January 21 (Thursday)
Time: 7:00pm, central time
now available for purchase on the Recovery Remixed site
When we were young, we took in messages about ourselves and the world that powerfully shape who we are and how we live today. Because these messages were taken in at a young age, we weren’t developmentally able to rationally reflect on or evaluate them — we simply internalized them.
This conditioning powerfully affects our attitudes and actions related to sexuality. To move forward in our recovery from any kind of sexual struggle, we need to understand the messages we’ve internalized about sex, and learn how to “recondition” ourselves.
An emotional affair happens when a person invests too much emotional energy with someone outside their marriage, and in turn receives too much emotional support and companionship from that relationship. How much is “too much?” There aren’t black and white rules for when a relationship moves from innocent friendship to an emotional affair … but there are patterns, and signs to watch for. In an emotional affair, people often feel closer to each other than their spouses, and often experience increasing sexual tension.
In fact, emotional affairs are often the gateway leading to full blown sexual infidelity. “About half of such emotional involvements do eventually turn into full-blown affairs, sex and all.” (Source: MSNBC) Viewed from another perspective, most sexual infidelity happens between people who were in relationships that were already in - or edging into - emotional affair territory. Infidelity researcher Shirley P. Glass reports that “82 percent of affairs happen with someone who was at first ‘just a friend.’”
In a marriage, time together and emotional energy is limited, and so if one spouse is sharing intimate thoughts and feelings with someone else, this time and emotional energy is not available to their spouse. People in emotional affairs often don’t feel guilt about what they are doing, because there is no sex involved. But their spouses don’t see it that way.
Many marriage experts view emotional affairs to be as damaging as sexual affairs. A common characteristic of emotional affairs is dishonesty with one’s partner about the relationship. People in emotional affairs often deny and deceive their partners about how much time is being spent with the “affair partner,” and/or how much emotional intimacy is being shared. Much of the pain and hurt from an emotional affair is due to this deception, and the consequent feelings of being betrayed.
Some guidelines*:
You’re in danger of crossing the line if you…
1. Touch your friend in “legal” ways, like picking lint off his blazer, or putting your hand on her shoulder as you walk through a door.
2. Pay extra attention to how you look before you see him / her.
3. Think crush-like thoughts like “She’d love this song!”
4. Tell him / her more details about your day than you do your partner.
5. No longer feel comfortable telling your mate about this person and begin to cover up your relationship.
6. Experience increasing sensual tension; you admit your attraction to him/her but also insist to yourself that you would never act on it.
It’s about to get physical when you…
1. Find yourself feeling vulnerable and turn to the other person for support rather than to your mate or a trusted relative or friend.
2. Accelerate the level of intimacy through sensual or suggestive talk over email or the phone.
3. Put yourself in a situation where the two of you could be alone.
You can avoid the potential affair if you…
1. Stay honest with your partner. Share with him / her all your hopes, triumphs, and failures — as well as your attractions and temptations, which will help keep you from acting on them.
2. Stay honest with some close recovery friends. Telling them about your attractions and temptations will also help keep you from acting on them.
3. Make sure you have “couple time” with your spouse on a regular basis — away from the kids, your friends, and family. Given today’s busy schedules, this often requires commitment and planning.
4. Surround yourself with happy couples who don’t believe in fooling around. Having positive, emotionally connected role models will help you stay on track.
Some quotes about emotional affairs:
A common result of growing up with trauma and deprivation is what some therapists call an inability to “self sooth.” In healthy families parents model and teach their kids how to comfort themselves when they feel angry, stressed, or sad. When that doesn’t happen - especially when kids grow up with an over-abundance of stress and sadness - this is experienced as an inner emptiness that gives rise to unhealthy coping strategies later in life (including addictions, workaholism, and codependency).
This inner emptiness is a challenge for many people, and it doesn’t just go away when we grow in a relationship with God. The famous quote by Saint Augustine that “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God” is true enough about life in general, but we’re talking about the void that is created by suffering in early life and an absence of nurture.
This inner emptiness gives rise to addiction, and creates challenges for people in recovery. Many clients report that after experiencing some time of sobriety, they will struggle with times of “restlessness,” not knowing what to do with themselves. Think of being at home on a Sunday afternoon, and nothing sounds interesting or engaging enough to do. Nothing on TV, work projects seem to require too much energy, no social engagement planned … nothing seems appealing. This is often associated with depression, but it’s something more, and can be present even when other depressive symptoms are absent. It’s an inner emptiness, or restlessness. You used to cope with this by using, or acting out. Now what?
Let me offer a “Meditation Remix” (extended quote from a meditation book with a few adaptations by me). This is from a wonderful meditation book by Tian Dayton, called Forgiving and Moving On. Pick it up if you can. Here’s a remix of her meditation on “Accepting Emptiness.”
Today I see that anxiety arises inside of me when I fear my own inner emptiness. I run from the feeling and try to find activities to keep me from it. I will try something different today. I will accept the emptiness and allow it to be there. Rather than be anxious about it, I will realize that worry will not help remove or reduce it. I will relax and let the emptiness just be there without running away from it or resisting it.
Eventually the feeling will transform into something else and I will allow that to happen. Awareness of a painful state can be all that I need to transform that state into something different. It is in my resisting feeling states that they gain a hold over me - when I allow them to be, they are allowed the room to move and change.
I would add that if the emptiness really seems overwhelming, you may want to reach out to someone else. Make a call, visit a friend … do something outside of yourself. What Dayton is talking about is learning to manage our emotions by sitting with them and allowing them to be transformed. But sometimes - especially in early recovery - we may not be ready or able to do this, and we need to get out of our isolation.
But by all means, if you feel ready to try it, follow Dayton’s advice in this meditation. Sometimes the only way out is through, and the feeling of inner emptiness may be powerfully transformed just by facing it.
A new study suggests that feelings of loneliness can spread through social networks like the common cold.
“People on the edge of the network spread their loneliness to others and then cut their ties,” says Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School in Boston, a coauthor of the new study in the December Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “It’s like the edge of a sweater: You start pulling at it and it unravels the network.”
Christakis and Fowler examined data from a long-term health study based in Framingham, Mass., a small town where many of the study’s participants knew each other. The Framingham study followed thousands of people over 60 years, keeping track of physical and mental heath, habits and diet.
Click here for a full article about this study on the lastingleaders.com website.
I recently led a teleseminar on cross addictions. It was interesting and helpful for me to do the research for it, and deal with the many helpful and insightful comments and questions.
Few people are addicted to just one thing. The achilles heel of recovery is often that by putting out the fire of addiction in one area, we simply ignite a bigger fire in another area. So the person who gets into recovery for alcoholism gets sober from alcohol, but gets deeper into his or her sex addiction. Or the person in recovery from sex addiction gains 20 pounds because his or her food addiction starts getting out of control.
In her wonderful book “Desire,” Susan Cheever quotes Pat Carnes as saying that “the mono drug user in our society is a vanishing species.” Carnes refers to cross addictions as a form of “bargaining with chaos.” That’s where we tell ourselves that we’re going to stop sexually acting out, but give ourselves permission to smoke/drink/eat more instead.
Here are some statistics, from a speech by Stephanie Carnes, a leading addiction expert in her own right, on cross addictions:
We all have tendencies to self pity. We will never be perfectly free from it. In fact, in some ways, self-pity is normal and may even be helpful as part of the process of grieving our losses, and coming to terms with unresolved childhood wounds.
Pete Walker, in “Recovering: The Adventure of Life Beyond Addiction,” has this to say about self-pity: “Everyone needs to occasionally feel sorry for themselves. Tears for the self are some of the most potently healing experiences of recovery. Self-pity, in balance and moderation, is extremely healing. Recovery, in fact, is often very limited until there are profound experiences of feeling sorry for the self.”
But there is a limit. Indulging too much in self pity is destructive, sucking the joy and energy out of life. Self pity is often characterized by a drained, apathetic, low-energy bearing. Self-pitying people seem tired, and also sometimes resentful. When someone exhibits a low energy or apathetic bearing, and seems resentful at the same time, you can assume that self-pity is eating them up inside.
The danger of indulging in self-pity is that it can serve to prevent our moving forward in recovery (if we stay stuck in it). Self-pity can even lead to re- lapse. This makes sense if you realize that self-pity was often an important ingredient in our thinking that justified our acting out when we were active in our addiction.
As long as we could feel sorry for ourselves and blame someone else for our problems, we didn’t have to accept things that happened to us as consequences for our actions. Self-pity is also part of the despair that is part of the addiction cycle. After we have acted out, we feel a terrible sense of despair, that nothing is ever going to change about our addiction … that we are beyond help. As long as we believe this, we don’t have to go through the hard work of change. We can just stay stuck.
The antidote for destructive self-pity is gratitude. We can be aware of the ways in which we have been hurt, and not minimize the suffering in our lives … and yet all the while also live with gratitude. It doesn’t have to be either/or. We can grieve our losses, and also be grateful for our blessings. That is the road to authenticity … and recovery.
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